Close relationships: Saliva reveals close relationships with babies

Foreign saliva scares us first. Unless it comes from your own children or other loved ones. Then we let go of our shyness and kiss or lick an ice cream together. And this is a clear sign that even young children understand and understand a close relationship. At least that’s what a study by Ashley Thomas of Harvard University and her team in Science suggests., In short: Anyone who isn’t shy about spitting should relate to the immediate environment.

To this end, the working group conducted a series of experiments with children aged five to seven, for example with cartoons and people playing with dolls. The little ones successfully predicted that sharing objects or licking food together only happened in nuclear families. If it was about “only” friendship, then food or toys are shared, but only if they are not “saliva”. But they were also able to find connections in young children: infants and young children at least assume that people who share their saliva with each other help each other in emergency situations.

This goes beyond individual cultures, so it is not specific to Europeans or Asians alone, for example, as a study with a larger, economically, geographically and ethnically more diverse sample of young children showed. The exchange of saliva in close relationships is culturally widespread, write Thomas and Co.

“We know that kids notice who’s nice to another,” Thomas says. “The most important finding from our study is that infants pay attention not only to characteristics of people, but also to who is attached to them and how they are connected.”